In an encouraging move, Prime Minister Tsvangirai used his weekly newsletter column to speak out on tolerance of difference, and effectively responded to the anti-homosexual remarks attributed to him in The Herald recently. Thank you Tsvangirai for clarifying your position on tolerance of difference. Does this mean we can expect to see sexual orientation included with race, gender, tribe, culture, and political affiliation in the Constitution as areas of prejudice which Zimbabwe will not condone?

Here is an excerpt from the letter:

There can be no place in the new Zimbabwe for hate speech or the persecution of any sector of our population based on race, gender, tribe, culture, sexual orientation or political affiliation. All of us are entitled to our own opinions on certain values and beliefs, but in order to move our nation forward and achieve national reconciliation and healing, we have to uphold and foster the fundamental principle of tolerance, including tolerance of people that have chosen to live, believe and vote differently from ourselves. For too long, many of you, my fellow Zimbabweans, have not had the freedom of choice. Our new constitution shall be the cornerstone of a new society that embraces this particular freedom of choice and tolerance of both majority and minority views.

Following on from last week’s controversy, a Herald headline today reads: Tsvangirai flip-flops on gay rights.

One gets the impression some Herald editor was appalled at how “positive” last week’s article would have been for Tsvangirai in the eyes of many. I can almost hear the discussion in the newsroom – How dare you write something that makes Tsvangirai look anti-gay? Do you know how much popularity he’s going to gain for that? How much support that will win him? Quick, write something that makes him look pro-gay and tarnish his name again!

The article is venomous and unconstructive, but in the absence of any official statement from the MDC on this issue, is it any wonder that The Herald is taking the opportunity to further muddy the waters.

The content of The Herald article is too petty and preposterous to even engage with. But the point is that, of course, the MDC isn’t, and could never be swayed by a few “wealthy gays.” Who one does hope the MDC can be influenced by, however, are the variety of Zimbabwean individuals and organisations who agree that human rights are indivisible, who value tolerance and diversity, and who are appalled that the MDC would be willing to author a Constitution which discriminates against a minority.

I was appalled to read The Herald front page article this morning: President, PM speak on gays

It was particularly worrying to read Tsvangirai’s flippant remarks about homosexuality, given the MDC’s supposed founding principles of tolerance and human rights.

I resonated deeply with Delta’s blog on exactly this issue:

I live in a country where there are too many loud prejudiced voices, standing piously on the moral high ground, their sanctimonious gospel of intolerance surpassed only by the blinding glare of their fake halos.

Find Kubatana’s open letter to the MDC below. We look forward to being able to publish the MDC’s response soon.

RE: Prime Minister Tsvangirai’s comments in The Herald, March 26, 2010

The Kubatana Trust of Zimbabwe is very concerned with what we have read in the article entitled “President, PM speak on gays” in The Herald of March 26, 2010.

The article quotes Tsvangirai in these two paragraphs:

PM Tsvangirai concurred saying: “President mataura nyaya yemagay rights, yevamwe varume vanofemera munzeve dzevamwe varume. [“President you talked about gay rights, of men who breathe in the ears of other men.”]

“Bodo, apowo handibvumirane nazvo. Unogodirei kutsvaga mumwe murume yet vakadzi make up 52 percent (of the population)? Varume titori vashoma,” [“No, I do not agree with that. Why would you look for a man when women make up 52% of the population? We men are actually fewer,”] he said.

It is even more worrying that these remarks were made as part of International Women’s Day celebrations in Chitungwiza, where the theme was “Equal Rights, Equal Opportunities: Progress for All.”  The comments made by the Prime Minister speak more to “Equal Rights for Some” – not All.

Is The Herald article an accurate quotation of the remarks made by the Prime Minister’s in Chitungwiza?

If it is an accurate reflection of the Prime Minister’s response, and his personal views, what is the position of the MDC about homosexuality, gay rights and the protection of gay rights in the Constitution?

The Parliament of Uganda is currently debating the Anti-Homosexuality Bill, an extremely worrying and homophobic piece of legislation. This Bill draws strength from its assertion that homosexuality is “unafrican”. However, this assertion goes against the truth of history and culture, which finds instances of same-sex sexual relations between men and women across Africa, throughout time.

You can read the opinion of respected Ugandan human rights lawyer Sylvia Tamale, denouncing this bill, here:

• A Human Rights Impact Assessment of the Anti-Homosexuality Bill
• Why anti-gay Bill should worry us

Gays and Lesbians of Zimbabwe has been at the foreground of campaigning for gay rights, and have a wealth of literature available explaining the history of homosexuality in Africa. This history makes it clear that homosexuality is not a “Western import,” nor is it a response to demographic pressures in which one gender outnumbers the other.

The remarks attributed to the Prime Minister in The Herald suggest a simplistic, populist view of homosexuality. Is the Prime Minister seriously making an argument that because women out number men in Zimbabwe, men should not be in relationships with other men? If so, he is making an insulting, demeaning argument, which belittles the thousands of Zimbabwean men for whom homosexuality is their personal identity.

One’s sexuality is as integral a part of someone’s humanity as their race, gender, and religion. A Constitution that protects Zimbabweans against discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation is thus as essential as one that prevents discrimination on grounds such as race, gender, ethnicity, or religion.

When political leaders discriminate against one segment of the population in order to gain popularity with another, it encourages prejudice. This prejudice can easily fuel violence, hatred, and intolerance, which can divide the country. It is imperative that politicians use their public profile and status to promote tolerance, encourage diversity, and embrace all sectors of the population. To do otherwise is an egregious, offensive violation of the spirit of democracy, peace, human rights and ubuntu on which the Movement for Democratic Change is founded.

The Kubatana Trust of Zimbabwe

I live in a country that legislates morality; a country where the oppression of certain quarters of the society is institutionalized and where the law is used to police the personal choices of its citizenry, used as justification to intrusively enforce morality in the private lives of people.

I live in a country that daily wakes up to read of the most horrendous acts of inhumanity, shaking their heads as they sip their morning coffee and quickly moving away from the unpalatable story of the man who has raped his 3 month old baby to the cartoon section – thinking ‘what has this world come to?’

I live in a country that condones corruption, daily turning a blind eye to the cash exchanging hands between the commuter omnibus and the strategically placed traffic cop who will shrug off the guilt (if any) by reminding him or herself that survival supersedes any other moral code – he has kids to feed.

I live in a country where men and women make personal choices that impact on the lives of defenseless children, pursuing the thrill of illicit affairs, peeling skins off one another with scalding water, shedding blood with knife stabs and as domestic violence escalates, society looks the other way or offers ineffectual sermons on the need to ‘seek counseling from elders, church, relatives or professionals’.

I live in a country where the bulk of the citizenry have the biblical log stubbornly lodged in their eyes and still claim a right to criticize the ‘speck’ in the eyes of the few who are seen as making ‘unnatural’ choices because (to their way of thinking) they have a right to dictate what grown up adult men choose to do behind closed doors.

Gay people in Zimbabwe (and yes they are there) have been victims of the worst social injustice in recent times – likened to animals, their human dignity has been torn to shreds by the vicious machinery of bigoted public opinion.

I am a sucker for social justice and to me, social justice rests firmly on the belief that every human being has a right to life, a right to hold autonomy over their body and a right to dignity (if you can’t respect their choices at least acknowledge that they have a right to their dignity).

So I ask myself, where is this social outrage, anger and vicious dissention when we need it most? Where are these chiefs (would-be enforcers of morality) when rapists prey on the frail grannies who are under their chieftaincy – where is this vehement and boisterous condemnation of such acts?

Why are these enraged defenders of morality silent where it matters most? Do they challenge the man caught in bed with a married woman, do they vilify the married man who’s having an affair with a school child?

Yet it is almost comical (if one can ignore the superciliousness) to hear how our intolerant society is up in arms against the gay community.

Those who still have breath (after denouncing homosexuality by screaming themselves hoarse) often pose the question, ‘what are we going to do about these gays?’

Well, I was thinking – how about we leave them alone?

I’m certain being homosexual is not a contagion so we can all rest assured that there won’t be an ‘outbreak’ of homosexually oriented people. Among the arguments I have heard made against recognizing the rights of gay people is that what they are doing is ‘immoral, unnatural and contrary to God’s plans’.

It is the latter that leaves me in stitches, because this tendency to brandish the bible like some tool of exorcism meant to subdue gay people into sexual conformity is what defeats the whole purpose of the exercise – the bible above all else teaches love, values tolerance and expressly appoints God alone as the judge.

How selective (not to mention hypocritical) of people to use an article of faith like the bible to impose their own beliefs on others and worse still to go on and enact it into legislation.

I think too many people in our society suffer from the fallacious thinking that gay people actually need our permission, consent or approval to exist, to be what they are and to have the sexual preferences that they have.

They don’t.

Gay people have nothing to apologize for; they don’t owe us heterosexuals any explanation and our refusal to recognize their right to privacy and dignity doesn’t change the fact that they have those rights by virtue of having been born human.

So while we can curtail the expression of the rights and liberties of the gay community by criminalizing their sexual orientation, using legislation to bludgeon them into submission and using other social institutions to victimize, terrorize and degrade them – gay people remain human, not animals.

They are gay, so what?

While the idea may repulse many; I think at the end of the day we have no right (moral or otherwise) to dictate the sexual lives of gay people in as much as they have no right to dictate to us heterosexuals.

I live in a country where there are too many loud prejudiced voices, standing piously on the moral high ground, their sanctimonious gospel of intolerance surpassed only by the blinding glare of their fake halos.

What I resent and challenge is the idea that one person or set of people has a right to impose definitions of reality on others.

To paraphrase, Arthur Schopenhauer’s views, they tell us that (homosexuality) is the greatest state of insanity… that (homosexuality) is wrong; when it is quite obvious that there is nothing in the world to which every man has a more unassailable title than to his own life and person.

I don’t believe in homosexuality. But I also don’t believe that anyone has a right to take what is an article of faith to their selves and legislate it (or impose it on) to other people.

ZimRights Director, Mr. Okay Machisa was arrested yesterday, Tuesday 23 March 2010 at Gallery Delta. He was in the process of finalising arrangements for the launch of an art exhibition entitled ‘/Reflections’/. Following the intervention by Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights Mr. Okay Machisa was released from Harare Central Police Station.

At a press conference today, Irene Petras, Director of Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights, described the conditions for Mr. Machisa’s arrest and the holding of the photographs in the following press statement:

The Officer Commanding Harare Central District, *Chief Superintendent G Gwangava,* advised that he had ‘/not approved’/ the launch and gave Mr. Machisa seven days to provide ‘/letters of consent from individuals and organisations’/ appearing in the photographs, failing which he threatened to prefer unspecified criminal charges against Mr. Machisa.

It is ZLHR’s considered legal opinion that the seizure and retention of the photographs by the police is unlawful and unjustifiable, as are the threats of criminal prosecution and the attempts to prevent the invitation-only launch from proceeding.

Such actions are solely calculated to instil fear and paralysis within civil society and to prevent free assembly, association and expression around national events and processes. For too long, civil society has been excluded by political parties and state institutions and actors from participating – as is its fundamental right – in issues around governance, national healing and reconciliation, and other matters which are in the national interest.

For this reason, ZLHR has been instructed by ZimRights to file – and has indeed filed – an Urgent Chamber Application demanding the immediate return of the photographs. The application also challenges the unjustifiable attempt to prevent the launch from taking place today, and the threats to prefer criminal charges, which, in our considered legal opinion, have no basis in law.

Mr. MacDonald Lewanika, co-ordinator for Crisis in Zimbabwe Coalition expressed civic society’s concern regarding the unlawful arrest and harassment of civic activists by state security agents. These actions have escalated in the last few months. Other ZimRights officials as well as Mr. Machisa have received threats via cell phone and email. In addition, the Secretary General of the General Agriculture and plantation Workers Union of Zimbabwe has also recently experienced harassment and intimidation from state agents. Mr Lewanika stressed that this behaviour was unwarranted and unjustifiable. Crisis In Zimbabwe Coalition is working to bring these matters to the attention of the mediators in the dialogue process around Zimbabwe’s political agreement, including President of South Africa Jacob Zuma. When asked about engaging the Ministers of Home Affairs in this issue he said:

“I think that the question of local remedies in Zimbabwe in situations like this, and this kind of behaviour by the police shows that as a place where you can run to [for protection] they are not an option. This idea of even engaging the Co-Ministers of Home Affairs Mr. Giles Mutsekwa and his counterpart Mr. Kembo Mohadi, is something that even while we do it, we think that that is no way for a country to operate. You can’t ask for ministerial intervention every time that something happens. It shows us that the problems we are trying to deal with are more fundamental than what we are looking at. Which is why this is important. The exhibition itself sought to raise the issues around the conduct of the police services. The police need to conduct themselves in a manner that ensures that such actions [intervention by high ranking members of government] are not necessary.”

ZHLR is currently waiting to hear from the Judge President, and has asked for the photos to be returned. The launch, which Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai is expected to attend, will go on as planned.

According to an article published on www.africanliberty.org, “Rejoice Ngwenya simply rejects Mugabe’s cohorts anthem of western sanctions being responsible for starvation in Zimbabwe.” Instead, Rejoice demands that Africans stop blaming others for self-inflicted misery.

Robert Mugabe’s brutal thirty year-old reign in Zimbabwe, compounded by a frenzied ten-year mutilation of property rights, is once again on the cover page of the country’s annals of food insecurity.  The pillaging, plunder of strategic commercial farms and national resources by privileged political elite has over the past decade emaciated our country’s productive capacity. At the epicentre of this carnage is central bank governor Dr Gideon Gordon who masqueraded as the benevolent bankroller of the curiously named ‘farm mechanisation program’ that mostly looted NGO funds to prop up Mugabe’s plummeting political fortunes.

To rub salt to injury, habitual ZANU-PF choirmaster Dr Joseph Made, now head of an apparition termed ‘ministry of agricultural mechanisation’ has been spewing brain-damaging propaganda via the Mugabe-owned Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation. He trumpets the discredited theory that ‘illegal Western-imposed sanctions’ are to blame for all our harvest misfortunes.

Progressive Zimbabweans know that white farmers were evicted overnight from their properties with no time to pack, and then whole villages frog-marched to vast tracts of arable land that now lie fallow. Confronted with high-value assets but no expertise, these Mugabe foot soldiers looted the once profitable farms, unplugging irrigation pumps, uprooting pipes and stripping electrical fittings for quick disposal on the black market. Now, in a show of award-winning naivety, Joseph Made tells the world that ‘resettled farmers fail to produce because Western-imposed sanctions limit their access to equipment spares’. He must think we Africans are daft!

The Red Cross and World Food Program predict patched lips for Zimbabwe’s legion of rural citizens in 2010. Ironically, sophisticated farmer and MDC agriculture minister-designate Roy Bennet faces the hangman’s noose for a yet-to-be-substantiated terrorism charge while his counterpart, Tendai Biti conspires an epic cap-in-hand safari in search of food aid. My question: if ZANU-PF moguls are hoarding multi-million US dollar diamond mine claims in Marange, why would a sensible government want to further burden suffering citizens with more debts?

The cause of inevitable starvation is not all about scrappy weather patterns and as ZANU-PF apologists would like to claim, ‘illegal sanctions’. For almost a decade, Gideon Gono and Robert Mugabe poisoned our minds with a false doctrine that ‘Government is God’ so much so that dependency became habitual. Now that a more sustainable fiscal management and national accountability system is in place, ZANU-PF’s seemingly eternal pool of benevolence has evaporated. In any case, for all the so-called investment in farming that Gono spearheaded, there is nothing to show for it except a ‘ministry of mechanisation’, de-forestation, the first lady’s Gushungo Dairy Estates and two million vulnerable citizens!  Zimbabwean villagers stare starvation in the eye, yet there is a cruel twist to fate linked with this plot.

It was in the year 2000 that Robert Mugabe and his militant gang of ‘war veterans’ dismantled organised farming. To achieve their sinister political motive, they exploited idle village idiots, wherefore this rhythm of destruction was replicated in subsequent elections, causing internal and external displacement of millions of Zimbabweans. Ironically, these Jurassic ZANU-PF outcasts and their families also now face starvation. Arguing from a pedestal of high moral ground, the Tsvangirayi half of government cannot worry only about the welfare of their supporters, even where most beneficiaries of free land, free fertiliser, free seed and free fuel were ONLY ZANU-PF activists. The machinery of patronage, running right from the president’s office through to provincial governors, district administrators, chiefs, headmen was and still has ZANU-PF imprints. Former military officers control the Grain Marketing Board to compliment this toxic cycle of patronage. Remember that in all election years, Mugabe used to ‘ban’ NGOs from rural areas, claiming that food humanitarian agencies were ‘advancing a regime change agenda!”

Now here is my rationale. In Somalia, Uganda, Sudan and DR Congo, food relief is known to be routinely ‘hijacked’ by insurgents either for re-sale or personal use. More often than not, these are the same clowns responsible for food insecurity in those regions, but are first in handout queues when peace prevails. Now that Morgan Tsvangirayi and Tendai Biti are – to use ZANU-PF lingo – in ‘control of food relief’, Mugabe supporters are screaming ‘murder!’ and yet those are the same marauding gangs responsible for causing the current food production deficit in the first place! My humble submission is that these shameless citizens and members of their families should not be allowed within a fifty-kilometre radius of ‘MDC or NGO-sourced’ food distribution. Instead, Gideon Gono and Joseph Made must be hauled before a court of law to explain how the so-called ‘farm mechanisation’ and the freebies doled out since 2000 have added zilch to our country’s strategic food reserves. What we see, however, is Mugabe and his cronies persistently refusing to allow an official land audit in the hope that this gigantic fraud called ‘land reform’ will remain confined to a sealed black box.  I want to ask: of what use is a land revolution if all it produces is mass starvation, a tattered country reputation, few wealthy political elites, broken families and half a million displaced farm workers?

So what am I saying: the cruel reality is that everyone who participated in the plunder and destruction of Zimbabwe’s food productive capacity must not taste a single morsel of food relief. Those who are in the current echelons of governance like Made, Gono and even Mugabe – must be subject to a Parliamentary enquiry to explain why millions of US dollar investments in free agriculture inputs over the past ten years have failed to yield sustainable food surpluses. The sanctions story will be excluded from the repertoire of defence. It is not only an excuse of small minds but an insult to our intelligence. Community-based organisations and progressive activists can identify ZANU-PF collaborators who beat up, maimed and exiled villagers, publish names to inform them that they will not receive anything from an MDC-inspired humanitarian effort. Just for once, we Africans must learn to be responsible for our actions and refrain from time-worn scapegoats.